"I am very proud of you. All my friends are pleased. My heart is big with emotion and my head is full of thoughts. This is a great day for you and also for me. Some of you are sad, for you long for the old things--the big, broad plain, the elk, and the buffalo. So do I. I loved those things also. But you have seen how it is. The water of the stream never turns back to the spring, the old man never grows young, the tree that falls does not rise up again. So the old things come never again. We have always to look ahead. Perhaps, in the happy hunting-ground all will be different, but here now we must do our best to live upon the earth. It is the law that, now the game being gone, we must plough and sow and reap the fruit of the soil. That is the meaning of all we have done to-day. We have put away the rifle; we here take up the hoe.
"I am glad; my heart is like a bird; it sings when I see you happy.
Listen--I will tell you a great secret. You see this young woman," he touched Elsie. "You see she wears the Tetong dress, the same as I; that means much. It signifies two things: Last year her heart was hard towards the Tetongs; now it is soft. She is proud of what you have done.
She wears this dress for another reason; she is going to be my wife, and help me show you the good way." At this moment a chorus of pleased outcries broke forth. "Now, go to your feast. Let everything be orderly.
To-night we will come to see you dance."
With an outburst of jocular whooping, the young men wheeled their horses and vanished under cover of a cloud of dust, while the old men and the women and the children moved sedately back to camp; the women chattering gayly over the day"s exciting shows, and in antic.i.p.ation of the dance which was to come.
There were tears in Elsie"s eyes as she looked up at Curtis. "They have so far to go, poor things! They can"t realize how long the road to civilization is."
"I do not care whether they reach what you call civilization or not; the road to happiness and peace is not long, it is short; they are even now entering upon it. They can be happy right here, and so can we," he ended, looking at her with a tender wistfulness. "Can"t you understand?"
"You have conquered," she said, with deep feeling. "Under the spell of this day, I feel your work to be the only thing in the world worth doing." Her words, her voice, so moved him that he bent and laid a kiss upon her lips. When he could speak, he said: "Now I want to ask something of you. I have a leave of absence for six months. Show me the Old World."
She sprang up. "Ah! Can you go?"
"When the crops are garnered and sifted, and my people clothed and sheltered."
"I"d rather show you Paris than anything else in the world!" she cried.
"I"d almost marry you to do that."
"Very well, marry me; we will spend our honeymoon there; perhaps then you will be willing to spend one more year here with me, and then--well--Never cross the range till you get to it is a maxim of the trail."
THE END